aA SHELTER is a 1600 square foot interior space on the street level of a church building on the Upper West side of New York City. The church was established in 1830 to assist the needs of the city's poor and homeless.This mission continues today. The church was serving from a worn linoleum lined aA SHELTER room that was dark, and dilapidated. It is used for meals (up to 80 people for a sit down meal), sleeping, social, medical and psychiatric services. The homeless are constantly moving through the city and as this is one of the spaces they know, the architecture of the renovation seeks to acknowledge and “write” this transience into the surfaces and structure of the space.
The space is laid out using an unfamiliar measuring system that places the homeless and workers on an equal footing. Changing geometry emphasizes movement and journey by making a topographic surface that responds to the use. As the space has very limited access to daylight, and no direct sunlight, the design fills the space with fluorescent light, paints the existing surfaces of the room white to reflect the light, then suspends a laser cut perforated ceiling below the light source that has the effect of changing the light quality as one moves around the space. The new ceiling, floor and wall are in a honey/butter color, and warms the light quality of the space. The new back wall, required for the storage, is contoured to accommodate this, while keeping the western window in the room. The geometry further relaxes the vertical of the wall so that one might lean up against it, sit on it, and move around it. A pattern of lines articulates the changing geometry on the wall, and these reverberate through the ceiling and floor until they meet the entry wall at 90degrees. The material for aASHELTERis primarily construction grade plywood of inished in an industrial grade epoxy and is a contemporary version of the adjacent historic wood paneled room. Every piece of the new construction is a specific and different shape with the connection details embedded in the piece. They are all numbered so the volunteers can assemble them as they would a puzzle. The design used scripting and digital modeling to generate the forms, patterns, lines and details. Each piece of the floor, wall and ceiling was modeled for fabrication and drawn for assem- bly, by the architects. This allowed the fabricators to donate part of their time. The design was able to create a community of workers ranging- from high-end technologically sophisticated fabricators through to New York City homeless folk.
When designing this project it seemed that many lives were converging on this space in the city, and these lives were often lived without stable co-ordinates. Nonetheless a coherent geometry was used (without a grid), that used lines in a single continuous direction, meandering through a created topographic space. The pattern of these lines tell stories of the space and articulate the divisions within the material of the project. At the plane of the ceiling, the lines turn to perforations, diffusing the light across the space. The continuous change in the pattern affords a textural intensity to build up and subside, and we choreographed this to pre-figure an imagined use patterning of the space. Each project detailed in this chapter similarly has its own textural creations rendered in light.perforations, diffusing the light across the space. The continuous change in the pattern affords a textural intensity to build up and subside, and we choreographed this to pre-figure an imagined use patterning of the space. Each project detailed in this chapter similarly has its own textural creations rendered in light.
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